1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to ontology driven natural language processing (NLP) and, more specifically, to providing contextual validation of synonyms in ontology driven NLP.
2. Description of the Related Art
A common problem in natural language text is under-specification. For example, when people speak to one another, there is a shared context, which allows an understanding of context-specific words and phrases. When a user interacts with an expert system, a shared context is also desired. However, it is sometimes difficult for a computer to understand language because of under-specification and the lack of shared context.
Currently, NLP can be used to achieve advanced online question answering services. NLP provides technology that attempts to understand and identify the syntactical structure of a language. For example, NLP has been used to identify the parts of speech of one or more terms in a submitted sentence to support the use of sentences as natural language queries against data. However, systems that use NLP to parse and process queries against data, even when the data is highly structured, can suffer from performance problems due to ambiguity in keywords.
Ontology-driven NLP parses natural language text and transposes it into a representation of its meaning, structured around events and their participants. Queries can then be matched to this meaning representation in anticipation of any of the permutations, which surface in the text. However, these permutations can also suffer from under specification, wherein an appropriate context must be assumed to understand a statement or query. This ambiguity as to the assumed context sometimes contributes to inaccurate and undesirable results.